We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Londoners are to be asked what they think about using force to prevent people smoking in ‘public’ places (meaning privately owned places to which members of the general public may choose to enter… or not enter).
I do not smoke, though I did puff on a Havana recently, and I generally do not like smoke filled rooms. However, I do not have anyone holding a gun to my head forcing me to go into a smoke filled room against my will or compelling me to take employment with someone who allows people to smoke on their private property (such as a restaurant or bar owner). And yet millions of people see nothing wrong with legitimising threats of violence against others to force them to not smoke for nothing more than their personal convenience.
To take the view that replacing social interaction (such as deciding to walk out of a bar because it is too smoky or quitting your job because you dislike smoky environments) with political interaction, namely agreeing that people can be dragged off to jail by armed men because they smoke in places you would like to enter as a matter of your discretionary ease, is nothing less than taking the view that imposing your convenience by force (and we are not talking prohibiting robbery or murder here) is okay, because anything done via political process is okay. This is what is really meant when people like George Monbiot talk about ‘a more democratic society’… what they really mean is a society in which all interaction is political rather than social.
The genius of the US Constitution was not that it brought forth democracy, albeit one which countenanced slavery (for Britain was also a democracy of sorts in 1776), it was that at its core the revolutionaries tried to place whole swathes of civil society simply off-limits to political interaction… such as free speech, the means of self defence, being secure in your property etc. It recognised that liberty can only exist within the context of a functioning extended civil society, which means the messy melee of free association and disassociation, private ownership, trade and freely entered into contract, actions constrained and encouraged by social imperatives and opprobrium, rather than the stern violence backed impositions of politically derived law.
For a minarchist such as myself, I see a role for democratic politics as a means of constraining the minimal state that even I concede is required to keep the barbarians from the gates of civilization. Yet until democratic politics is once more seen as underpinning a free republic and not an end in and of itself, most politics must seen as a baleful thing and the people who practice it professionally as legislators little different from Mafia Dons dispensing patronage amongst the people under their ‘protection’
In many places across the Anglosphere, civil society is dying under the cumulative pressure of decades of regulatory statism. “There ought to be a law against it” comes to the lips of anyone who dislikes anything…and yet at the same time the moral authority of states is decaying with trends pointing to ever less people choosing to participate in political processes in an ever more affluent and information rich civilization. This is one of the central contradictions of our modern information age and sooner or later those contradictions will cause something to give in ways that cannot be reliably predicted.
I have been struggling to find a slick way to use the phrase the ‘gobbledegook’ in this sorry little saga but however I stack it, it still sounds clunky.
Let’s just say, as ye sow so shall ye reap. [From the UK Times.]
TURKEY farmers are barricading their premises to prevent the spread of a savage disease after Brussels banned the only drug that can eradicate it. Ten million turkeys being reared for the £100 million Christmas trade are at risk from blackhead (Histomanos meleagridis), which can destroy entire flocks.
The disease, which enters the gut of birds and attacks their liver, has broken out in France, Germany and the Netherlands and farmers fear that it will be carried into Britain by migrating birds. East Anglia and Kent are particularly vulnerable.
Two predictions:
- It will transpire that this drug was banned as a result of ferocious lobbying by the enviro-mentalists.
- The EUnuchs will try and find some way to blame this whole farrago on the Americans in general and George Bush in particular.
Brian Linse seems to be very self-satisfied today over the fact that John Lott Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime (1998), is currently on the ropes in defending his work. He is even going to the point of calling Prof. Lott’s central thesis “fraudulent”. I do not know what Brian’s background is, but I would guess from this that he is neither an attorney or a scientist. In either of those cases, he would know that simply because a theory is flawed, that constitutes no grounds for labeling it fraudulent. Brian should also be aware that, simply because a theory is flawed in its details, that’s no reason to abandon the basic concept.
I must admit, I have been quite remiss in following the efforts to debunk Prof. Lott’s work over the past year or so. But this is a pet issue of mine, so I guess it is time I brought my talents to bear on the matter.
As luck would have it, there is no category called ‘Honking Great Hypocrisies’ so I have had to settle for filing this under ‘Education’ instead.
But that’s appropriate too because this story is nothing if not instructive:
Labour leaders backed Diane Abbott, the Left-wing MP, yesterday over her decision to educate her son privately, days after condemning a Tory MP for saying he would do the same.
Ms Abbott has used her wealth, status and privilege to give her child the best, as is befitting the ruling elite. In fact, Ms Abbott is merely following in the best traditions of Britain’s socialist politicians who have always had a curious and inexplicable penchant for both private education and healthcare (while publicly denouncing both).
Labour MPs were taken by surprise by the news that she had chosen the £10,000-a-year City of London Boys School for her son, by-passing four comprehensives in Hackney and Stoke Newington, the constituency she represents.
In the past Miss Abbott has criticised the Prime Minister, for rejecting schools in Islington and sending his sons to the London Oratory School in Fulham, and Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General, for choosing a grammar school outside her constituency. She once said of Miss Harman: “She made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another.”
Now where would anyone get that crazy, zany idea?
Philip Chaston is a regular contributor to the Airstrip One blog. He believes that the current political climate in Britain presents an exciting and unique opportunity.
Last Monday I went to the University of London Union to watch a concert given by the band British Sea Power. With me were a couple of friends, a carpenter and a handyman from South London. Just prior to the gig, I had been assailed by their voluble and bitter complaints while we downed some pre-concert alocohol in the Toucan Bar which is just around the corner from Soho Square in Central London.
The level of dissatisfaction with the government and the public services in London and the South East has risen over the last few years as people have seen their taxes rise without any perceived improvement in public services. This has been linked to increasing concern over levels of immigration. As my friend said, “I’m going to vote BNP in protest. Who else can I vote for?” → Continue reading: The Protest Vote
Tedd McHenry writes in with some creative musing on an idea that would allow even the most extreme privacy fetishist to harness a splendid cost minimizing technology whilst keeping the user shielded from intrusive data mining. With apologies to John Donne for the editor imposed title.
This idea was inspired by Highway 407 in Toronto, Canada, which is a toll highway. I do not know if it is privately managed, but it could be. I am very interested in both toll roads and private roads, which have been discussed before on samizdata.net. Highway 407 solves the toll-collection problem with two technologies. When a car enters and leaves highway 407 its licence plate is photographed, and that information is used to bill the owner for the distance traveled on the highway. Regular users can get a subscription wherein they mount a transponder on their car, which makes billing easier (and gives them a discount). Both of these technologies make toll roads much more viable by making toll collection cheaper and easier. But they both entail a very serious compromise of privacy, in that someone collects information on where and when your car travels.
The solution that occurred to me was to have, for lack of a better name, a privacy agent through which a car owner could subscribe to the highway. The transponder would be registered to the agent, and the agent would collect from the car owner. There would be no way for the bill to be tied to any actual person or vehicle.
Then it occurred to me that this system could be generalized for any service. You could interact with governments and markets through your privacy agent, much as subscribers to anonymizer.com interact with the web. Privacy agents could provide credit and debit card services allowing you to buy any product or service anonymously. Where a service requires identification (name, social insurance number, etc.) you would simply provide your privacy agent account number (and a PIN, to prevent fraud). Your public identity would be somewhat like a corporation, but with a reversal: whereas a corporation limits the liability of its owner but must publicly declare who he is, this body would not limit the liability of its owner but would also not publicly declare who he is.
There must be some holes in this plan, other than the obvious difficulty of selling it to politicians, but I am not coming up with them on my own. Any thoughts?
Tedd McHenry, Surrey, BC, Canada
My thanks to CNE President Tim Evans for emailing me about this New York Times article, about the Free State project. I usually look at the daily NYT menu. Sod’s Law (and a rugby game – won by plucky little USA) decreed that today I didn’t. First few paragraphs:
KEENE, N.H. – A few things stand out about this unprepossessing city. It just broke its own Guinness Book world record for the most lighted jack-o’-lanterns with 28,952. It claims to have the world’s widest Main Street.
And recently, Keene became the home of Justin Somma, a 26-year-old freelance copywriter from Suffern, N.Y., and a foot soldier in an upstart political movement. That movement, the Free State Project, aims to make all of New Hampshire a laboratory for libertarian politics by recruiting libertarian-leaning people from across the country to move to New Hampshire and throw their collective weight around. Leaders of the project figure 20,000 people would do the trick, and so far 4,960 have pledged to make the move.
The idea is to concentrate enough fellow travelers in a single state to jump-start political change. Members, most of whom have met only over the Internet, chose New Hampshire over nine other states in a heated contest that lasted months.
(The other contenders were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. One frequently asked question on the project’s Web site was “Can’t you make a warmer state an option?”)
Once here, they plan to field candidates in elections and become active in schools and community groups, doing all they can to sow the libertarian ideals of curbing taxes, minimizing regulation of guns and drugs, privatizing schools and reducing government programs.
I’ve quoted at some length because the New York Times’ stuff has a habit which I’ve recently learned about of going out of one-click no-cost reach after all while. (Is that recent? Or was I just ignorant about it all along?)
I predict two things about what will happen as a result of this project.
- It will have results.
- The most momentous results will not be what anyone envisaged to start with.
The law of unintended consequences applies, after all, just as much to libertarians as it does to anyone else. Most gatherings of the faithful in the USA seem to result in a bit of spreading of the faith but not a lot, and then, interesting business activities.
One thing already seems likely, however, which the moving spirits of this project did intend. It will stir up media interest in libertarian ideas, not only within the USA but to some extent also beyond it, this New York Times piece being a perfect example of that process.
Plato’s Utopia has long served as a double-edged sword to any aspiring totalitarian. Many of the world’s greatest adventurers, explorers and thinkers have sought the fabled Lost City of Atlantis, coming up with many convoluted theories as to where and how it really existed. Now an expedition to the Strait of Gibraltar may solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries.
Next month, an expedition to hunt for its remains among submerged Gibraltarian islands will be unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society, London, by a renowned geologist, Prof Jacques Collina-Girard, and the leaders of the Titanic expeditions. Prof Collina-Girard believes that generations of Atlantis obsessives overlooked the most obvious location: Plato’s account suggests Atlantis lay before the Pillars of Hercules – today’s Strait of Gibraltar.
Plato said the island kingdom was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was paradise: peaceful, cultured and unspoilt. A golden age continued for centuries, but eventually corruption got the better of its inhabitants and the gods punished them by submerging Atlantis.
In our fast-paced modern times, the EUropean utopia skipped the golden age to move directly to the corruption phase. If gods wish to retain any shred of their shattered credibility, a total submerging of all EU institutions would be well in place. And they’d better hurry, or they will have their work cut out by the European Directive on Submerging, Flooding and Destroying Continents that is soon to be approved by the EU Commission.
Directive 03/360BC/UTOPIA specifies that any destructive activities by the certified Deities, defined as protest to the political, social and cultural developments of Mortal Citizens (EU Directives 98/3740BC/NOAH and 99/2350BC/SOD&GOM), are to be closely monitored by the relevant agencies using the consolidated global experience and drawing on a long-term state-funded research of such occurrances. Or they could just apply retrospetive fines to penalise Mr Plato for unclear, inconsistent and misleading labelling of his products and services and insufficient specification of their location.
Speed cameras don’t reduce casualties – they are just for revenue generation
– Northumbria Police’s Acting Chief Inspector, Paul Gilroy
I really cannot add much to that.
A friend of Alice Bachini’s has been buying a fridge. The two most interesting obvservations are that an aesthetically different but otherwise identical fridge cost 50% more than the one that was purchased, and that it was possible to obtain a substantial discount by finding an internet retailer that offered the same fridge for substantially less than the high street retailer, and taking up the high street retailer’s offer to match any competitor’s price.
As for the first issue, I am presently reading Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style which is to a large extent about the first question (ie about why people care about fridges with different aesthetics, and why they are willing to pay a lot more for the right aesthetics). I will review the book when I finish reading it.
As for the second issue, well it brings up a big annoyance of mine about this country (which is a country that in most ways I rather like), which is that in some ways it isn’t that sophisticated as a retail market. In a lot of areas the high street is just horribly uncompetitive and anticompetitive. → Continue reading: Britain’s woefully uncompetitive high street
One of the many hats and t-shirts I wear is that of the National Space Society (NSS). We need a cultural component to our spaceward movement. It is not just to bind the ‘oldtimers’ together. We must spread the ‘frontier meme’ where it is extinct and nurture it where it still lives. It takes more than talk to do this. It takes art.
Prometheus Music in conjunction with NSS will soon release To Touch The Stars. It is now available for pre-release order.
The Sunday Telegraph reports on yet another example of the EU ‘standards’:
It was reported last week that an Austrian farmer, Johann Thiery, had been fined and threatened with prison for selling “apricot marmalade” made from a traditional Austrian recipe passed on by his grandmother. Under EU rules “marmalade” can only be made from citrus fruit. Sternly defending Mr Thiery’s punishment, a European Commission spokesman said: “The law is the law.”
Next day Pedro Solbes, the EU’s economics commissioner, was reported as defending the right of France and Germany to run up huge budget deficits, in flagrant breach of the Growth and Stability Pact. “Given the circumstances we face,” he said, “it would be unwise to follow the letter of the law.”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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